Are kind of missing the point. If you actually need to use a gun, you don't want a ton of hardware that will prevent it from firing when you pull the trigger.

Ask the Army if they really want their guns locked to only work when they pull the trigger, so when they pick up a fallen soldier's gun in the middle of a battle after running out of ammo it won't fire.

The article and especially the summary is completely wrong about their central claim "gunmakers have no incentive...".
Of course that's typical - anti-gunners would never shoot, never handle a firearm, so they normally have no idea what they are talking about.
The supreme requirement in a firearm is RELIABILITY. If you are in a situation where you actually have to fire your sidearm, you die if it doesn't work right that time.
A defensive weapon has to work every single time. That's why the 1911 design is still the second most popular model over a hundred years later - because it's been proven reliable. That's why you keep firearms simple - complex things break. That's also why you definitely don't add a bunch of complexity designed to make the gun NOT WORK if something isn't perfect - it has to fire, or an innocent person dies.
It's only people who don't know about firearms, or about dealing with bad guys in general, who think something like "fingerprinting" one persons particular grip sounds like a good idea. It does sound good, until you think about the fact that the user is UNDER ATTACK. They may very well have to fire with their other hand, after the BG smashes their right arms with a baseball bat, car, stabs them with a knife....
These "smart guns" look cool in movies, but anyone with any tactical experience or training knows they are only movie props. In real life, these ideas would get good guys killed every day. If you've never even been trained in USING a firearm, please don't pontificate about how they be be designed.

Exactly! This was one of the primary reasons I purchased and carried a Glock when I worked as an armed guard. That firearm actually did have 3 safeties, but they were all designed to prevent accidental discharge of the weapon if you dropped it or the trigger snagged on something. If there was a round in the chamber and your finger was all the way on the trigger the gun would fire.

In fact, if you do even one day of actual defense training, one of the exercises you do is shooting with a two-handed grip in the "A" stance, then shooting left handed "side stance" and then right handed "side stance".

This simple exercise would be impossible with some kind of electronic garbage that prevents firing based on grip signature. Also, I'd rather not have to worry about if the batteries are dead if I need the gun.

Here's what we need: a 1911-style grip safety, and a Walther PPK-style indicator pin that pops out close to the rear sight if a round is in the chamber. Those two things are remarkably effective, and cost practically nothing. Oh, and they've been around for decades.

Well, when Ralph Nader gets up in front of Congress and lies with the goal of killing babies, people accept it as the truth, after all, how much of a nutjob would you have to be to lie, knowing you lie would kill hundreds of babies?

Airbags were declared "safe" by Congress. The statistics showed Congress was wrong. But it was a case where pi was legislated to be 3, and everyone went along with it. Every objective measure indicates airbags are a failure. But the government can *never* be wrong, so airbag

I find this to be an interesting sentiment coming from a technology oriented community like Slashdot.

Of course complexity can increase error-proneness. But if this logic is always true, why aren't we still driving Model Ts? Maybe it really is up for debate, but it seems to me that cars have became vastly more complex over the decades, but reliability is on the rise, and cost of maintenance has gone down.

Planes - planes are vastly more complex than in the past, but very reliable. And peoples' lives literally hang in the balance.

My point is, we can in fact make complex AND reliable things when we want to, and when we spend the time and resources required. Why are guns exempt from this?

FWIW, I know how to use (some) guns, and I agree with you... "grip recognition" sounds like something that at best, will work 99% of the time, which isn't enough. But surely we can do better than that.

Firearms are mechanically simple. You can't add electronics to a simple mechanical device and make it more reliable. Electronics are less reliable than simple mechanical things, so any such change is a step backward.

Cars and planes are complicated mechanical and electrical devices. You can simplify the circuits and/or mechanical design by replacing some parts with computer control. But just the engine alone in either is well over an order of magnitude more complicated than a gun firing mechanism.

You can't add electronics to a simple mechanical device and make it more reliable. Electronics are less reliable than simple mechanical things, so any such change is a step backward.

Okay, even if it is a step backward in theory, in practice, are we really not able to engineer something to an acceptable level of reliability? Guns already do not work 100% of the time. They occasionally jam and misfire. We tolerate this unreliability because it is infrequent.

Let's say you have a gun that is 99.99% reliable... so one out of every 10,000 rounds it jams or misfires. And now, we add electronic safety components to it, and with testing and good engineering, we produce a gun that is 99.97% reliable. So it jams, misfires, or fails to fire 3 out of every 10,000 rounds.

The question is, I think, whether that decrease in reliability is an acceptable tradeoff for the increase in safety gained due to only the owner being able to fire it.

Jams and misfires often happen due to ammunition issues. Any drop in reliability for a safety mechanism is going to be additive on top of that. And just the ammo problem rate alone is inherently too high for some people, so a second component adding more risk is hard to justify.

The fact that jams etc. are relatively rare events is part of why I'm not optimistic about fancier electronic mechanisms. How often does software break because it's presented with a rare failure case the programmer didn't anticipate or test? It is amazingly easy to break a lot of software, sometimes permanently afterward, just by running out of disk space. If I have a threat serious enough that I'm arming myself against it, I'd prefer not to have a gun that crashes the first time an unusual ammo jam happens. We've had hundreds of years of evolution in mechanical firing mechanisms to resist problems seen in the field here; it will take a while to match that. And the disappointing track record so far for things like fingerprint security have not been encouraging.

Yes, it's possible to put enough money into R&D to make this a negligable risk, eventually. But who wants to fund that work? It's not as if a unique ID trigger suddenly makes the firearm so safe that you can just leave it sitting out. That means you still need a secured safe instead...so that's what the market has been providing. People who are willing to pay for that safety measure already have options available. And those don't become unnecessary if this other problem is solved, which adds to why it's hard to cost justify.

I know how my boss would feels if I took code that completed its task 99.99 percent of the time (.01% failure) and modified it so that it now completed it's actual task only 99.97% percent of the time (.03% failure). He'd want to know WHY in the hell I made a change that causes failure to occur 3x more often.

If the device was a pacemaker then that's 3x the deaths due to failure. Why would people buy that product if it was 3x more likely to fail?

If the device was a pacemaker then that's 3x the deaths due to failure. Why would people buy that product if it was 3x more likely to fail?

Because they gained some other benefit not quantified in the failure rate? E.g., maybe the less-failure prone pacemaker needs to be removed for battery replacement every three years, whereas the (slightly) more-failure prone one has a battery that lasts ten years?

There's actually a very simple solution to this. A built in trigger lock. Not meant to replace the mechanical safety catch already built in to all modern guns.

It's really quite simple, and is foolproof. A built in mechanical lock that only opens with a fingerprint scan and password. So you pick up a gun to use for the day, and unlock it. Now it's ready to use, Whenever you want. It automatically relocks itself after 12 hours, unless it's a police or military weapon which is settable to never relock itself o

I find this to be an interesting sentiment coming from a technology oriented community like Slashdot.

"The more complicated the plumbing, the easier it is to clog the drain." -- Scotty, Star Trek III

There used to be an engineering strategy called the "KISS principle". KISS was an acronym for "keep it simple, stupid." Today's nerds, especially those who work for Microsoft and at most web sites, have thrown this concept out the window.

But look at an iPhone or an Android -- their designers did what they could to make the sevice as simple as possible for the user. No good coder will write a thousand lines of code when fifty will do the same job.

Maybe it really is up for debate, but it seems to me that cars have became vastly more complex over the decades, but reliability is on the rise, and cost of maintenance has gone down

Yes, they're more complex and more reliable, but unlike firearms, automobiles were always complex. Firearms are simple machines requiring little maintenance... and BTW, cars are a hell of a lot more expensive to maintain these days. There was no such thing as a "brain box" or a "climate control module" in a 1970 Ford, and if one of these goes out it will cost you hundreds of dollars to replace. If your water pump went out you could fix it yourself in twenty minutes with a $20 part. Today? Good luck even finding the water pump, you're going to have to hire a mechanic. Gun owners don't want to take their gun to a gunsmith every damned hunting season.

My point is, we can in fact make complex AND reliable things when we want to, and when we spend the time and resources required. Why are guns exempt from this?

Just because you can do a thing doesn't mean you should. This topic is kind of a straw man anyway; none of these measures would have stopped the bloodshed last week; these measures mostly make the liklihood of it going off prematurely and killing the owner. And if a hunter's gun doesn't fire when that nine point buck is in his sights, you're going to have one pissed off hunter who will never buy that brand of gun again.

There's no need to make things unnecessarily complex. The debate is really about what features we want.

BTW, cars are a hell of a lot more expensive to maintain these days.

I would actually like to see a historical dataset of automobile maintenance and operating costs (inflation adjusted), but I can't seem to find a decent source right now. However, even if that is true, again, there is a tradeoff. If there are gains in safety, efficiency, utility, and comfort, the added expense can be justified.

Just because you can do a thing doesn't mean you should. This topic is kind of a straw man anyway; none of these measures would have stopped the bloodshed last week.

I'm not saying we should do it because we can, I'm saying maybe there are in fact good reasons to do, AND we can (since so many people seem to argue that it's impossible). Why is there such defeatism and resignation about the potential of technology in this area? It's irrational.

Second, the reason I was thinking about this RFID idea was specifically as a way to prevent what happened last week. If Lanza's mother had a key fob or implanted chip, Lanza would not have been able to use the guns without it. Could it still have happened? Sure. Maybe Lanza's mother would have given him his own fob. Maybe he would have taken her keys, or cut the chip out of her wrist. Maybe he would have cloned the fob himself. Any of those things are possible, but it would involve more time and effort, and introduce additional hurdles. If there is a process for obtaining a fob, maybe Lanza would not have met the burdens of the process. If he attacked his mother with a knife (because he couldn't use a gun), maybe she could have escaped and called the police.

Or maybe it still would have happened. Is that a reason to not consider any policy change? No. Maybe new policies and technology can prevent or reduce the risk of OTHER tragedies.

And if a hunter's gun doesn't fire when that nine point buck is in his sights, you're going to have one pissed off hunter who will never buy that brand of gun again.

This is why I suggested limited the requirement of such technology to only certain weapons. E.g., we don't mandate it for bolt action rifles.

But seriously, my main observation here is that so many people are spending lots of energy on inventing reasons for why nothing can be done.

I find this to be an interesting sentiment coming from a technology oriented community like Slashdot.

In my years in the tech industry, I've found that simple beats complex many times. Building a network without loops is more reliable than making one with loops and turning on STP. Having one high-quality router is more reliable than two in HA/VRRP/HSRP. Having one server is more reliable than two in a cluster (the clustering fails more often than any single server, lowering total reliability). Maybe a good bit of those problems are due to the proper usage being more complex, and those running them weren't sufficiently trained, but I've seen a lot more problems with complex redundancy than simple.

What about all of the other legitimate uses of firearms? If someone has a bunch of pistols or rifles because they are a target shooter wouldn't all those complexities be a great way to mitigate accidental discharges? While you're target shooting (and maybe even hunting) you have plenty of time to move your finger to the right position or switch to left hand mode. Police can still use the "simple gun" since they are more likely to use it in a life/death situation than someone that hangs out at a gun range. H

Absolutely. And the system described, according to their paper, in it's own words,

"The average success rate is 89.44%."

That's with a huge box of electronics attached to the gun via wires, in ideal, controlled conditions.

The ONLY way I would even begin to want to own such a thing is if there were NO external encumbrances, and it worked at least 99.9999% of the time, under varied and chaotic conditions, and doesn't rely on flaky batteries.

I hope you realize there is no such thing as non lethal weapons. The technical term is "Less than Lethal" because they can still kill or seriously injure. The military uses basically a hard core paintball gun in detention camps. It does serious damage if you shoot it in the wrong area. Ever get a frozen paintball in your eye? Tazers kill too, especially if the person has some sort of electrical implant. just google around. The argument you didn't mean to kill the person with a tazer wouldn't hold, just try

I 100% agree that we should look into non-lethal alternatives. I'd rather accidentally shoot my daughter with a taser when she sneaks in after curfew and watch her crap her pants than shoot her with a pistol and watch her bleed out.

Sounds like you should worry about using a bit more parental authority.

I never sneaked out of the house...never ever, ever, because we had guns in the house. For that very reason I would never sneak out of the house.

From a very young age, my parents let me know where the gun was, I wash taken and shown how to use it properly. I also had the fear of God put into me if I ever even thought of touching it when not appropriate. I also knew not to sneak out to risk being shot as an intruder.

One time I was home alone...it was raining, and some bum started ringing the doorbell, wanted some water, etc.

I went to their bedroom, got the gun, cocked and loaded the chamber and safety off....and held that as I yelled through the door for him to leave immediately.

When he finally left, I took the clip out, took the round out of the chamber and back into the clip, clip back into gun with safety on...put it back in place and immediately called my Mom at work to tell what had happened.

Can you not trust your kids to be as responsible?

If not, then I posit the problem is not guns...but a little more parental guidance is needed by the offspring.

as someone who has spent 8 years in the army, the military is fanatical about firearms safety

ammo is always kept separate from weapons. miles away in locked and guarded bunkersweapons are always locked in the arms room and inventoried any time the room is opened. by serial numberheavy weapons like 50 caliber machine guns have their firing pins kept separate from the rest of the weapon

at the firing range you only get ammo when its time to fireall weapons, even unloaded ones are considered loaded past a certain point close to the firing lineall weapons always face down range. you never point a weapon at a person

I'd also like to point out something that should be obvious even to a gamer who has never touched a real gun: not all gun manufacturers are in the USA. Why haven't European firearm manufacturers innovated these improvements? A grip safety might be an improvement on the Glock Safe Action. Legislating these changes in the USA is just another government power grab, because they know (and don't care) that the technology is not ready, so the end result is that law-abiding citizens will be kept from obtaining arms.

USA is the single biggest gun market. Even those European firearm manufacturers, they sell most of their guns in the USA. So if there is a US law mandating those things, they will happen - and most likely will apply to other markets as well.

These guns aren't for the army, their for the typical idiot consumer.I remember this old story on the news that a 3 year old picked up a gun, not knowing what it was, and shot his(?) mother when she tried to take it back.This would prevent stories like that.

Not allowing people who let others get at guns raise children would also prevent stories like that.

In some other countries, the firing mechanism must be stored seperately from the gun at all times, except when the weapon is being used.And definitely not loaded.

And also, the barrier to losing custody of your children is way lower. The way A.Z. was brought up would have been impossible in places with strong child protection laws.

In some other countries, the firing mechanism must be stored seperately from the gun at all times, except when the weapon is being used.And definitely not loaded.

Requiring that it be locked away securely accomplishes the same goal (keeping it out of the hands of children) without making it useless for self-defense. I am not interested in living in a country which makes it illegal to defend yourself.

And I'd gladly live in a country where it's illegal to defend myself by lethal means if it also meant the possibility of having to defend oneself with lethal means wasn't something a normal person would have to worry about.

Me too, but banning firearms won't solve that problem.

It's little wonder that so many Americans go apeshit with all the insane worries they have which others don't.

Which part of the 1911 should I remove that I will be able to reinstall quicker than unlocking the box it's in [firearmsdesigner.com]? Inquiring minds want to know.

At least when I was in the military, we had to drill on disassembling the gun completely and then reassembling it both as fast as possible, and then again the same drill in total darkness. Just inserting the bolt and loading it would take three seconds at most.Until we knew the gun, we were considered a danger, not an asset.

If a gun is constructed in a way that it's not possible to render it harmless or bring it back to operational quickly, it is a flaw with the gun, and it would be better removed from the market and replaced with better options. This is 2012, not 1911.

So learn to field strip the 1911. It can be rendered useless to useful and back again inside 1 minute.

Yes, I can remove the slide very quickly, and reinstall it fairly quickly, but then that wouldn't be removing the bolt or pin, would it? So in his country, I have to detail strip the weapon when I store it? This is the kind of insanity I want to avoid.

I can think of a couple redesigns that would allow the exposed hammer to be removed and quickly reinserted.

Keeping the bolt or other part crucial to firing the weapon separate is in general a sound idea. It even allows weapons to be made safe around children, while only requiring a much smaller locking box to store the gun parts in. For most bolt action rifles this is incredibly practical, for instance. Since they would require a full length gun safe other

A lot of people play games with statistics. Statistics in the US are pretty much meaningless, when it comes to an armed population. Anyone who manipulates numbers seems to have an agenda, so they manage to make the numbers say whatever their agenda demands.

The fact is, most of our most dangerous cities are the very cities with the strictest gun control laws.

Go ahead, read the report. Tell me how safe it is to live in a country with very strict gun control laws.

"We don't even have a national way to find out if you have ever been committed."

BINGO!!

I'm a veteran. Anyone with an interest, and my SSN can easily verify that. I don't know how much more info such an interested party can get, but he can easily verify that I am an honorably discharged veteran.

Convicts? Ditto. In fact, all you need is to be arrested these days, and that arrest record follows you forever, unless you can convince a judge to have it expunged.

Most especially, sex offenders. Get run in for pissing on some shrubbery, you're automatically a sex offender, and you've got to register with whatever county you live in, forevermore.

Mentally incompetent people? Spend a weekend at the local looney bin, get turned loose because you don't have insurance to pay for treatment, and there is no record. You can walk straight from the nuthouse to the gun shop, and fill out the paperwork to get a gun.

The 2nd amendment was only for the purposes of the formation of a militia.

Actually, it's purpose, like the rest of the "Bill of Rights," was to get the Constitution ratified. The public wanted assurances that a new, stronger federal government wouldn't be able to reinstate the abuses of the British (who would do things like quarter troops in private residences and confiscate guns). There is also the implied, though not explicitly stated, implication that citizens would maintain the means to revolt again, should the government abuse its new power. Of course, that didn't help out the Whiskey Rebellion revolutionaries, but what do you expect from Pennsylvanians?

It reestablished the liberty of Protestants to have arms for their defence within the rule of law, and condemned James II of England for "causing several good subjects being Protestants to be disarmed at the same time when papists were both armed and employed contrary to law".

The term "assault weapon" is a nebulous term based upon the presence of features that do not affect actual firearm function. Most "assault weapons" are in fact civilian sporting rifles featuring a pistol grip and at least one other defining feature that are most commonly seen at target ranges and occasionally in the hands of hunters.

The term is applied for the specific purpose of confusing those unfamiliar with firearms into believing that common civilian sporting firearms are actually military weapons.

...that should come out of the Connecticut school shooting tragedy should be this:

If anyone is planning to begin legal proceedings to have a family member involuntarily committed for mental health issues, then they must remove all weapons out of their home first.

That sounds even more than average stupid. If this was passed, the result would be that fewer would try to get their family members committed, and the white elephant hidden even more than it is now.

Make it easier for people to get help (and I mean help), not harder. And work for conditions less conducive to people developing mental health problems in the first place. Undo Reagan's damage. It's late, but not too late.

I remember this old story on the news that a 3 year old picked up a gun, not knowing what it was, and shot his(?) mother when she tried to take it back.
This would prevent stories like that.

So would locking guns in a gun cabinet when not in use, as you're obligated to do.

I know NOTHING about guns, being a Brit, but just from watching FPSRussia on YouTube I can tell you that you don't point a loaded gun at people EVER, you keep the safety catch on at all times except just before you fire, and after firing you check the chamber (receiver?) for a round before you do anything else, just in case you miscounted how many shots you fired. I'm sure there are plenty of other guidelines that morons don't follow, but these are obvious from watching a redneck shoot cans in his back yard.

Unless you have a seizure, or someone else does something moronic (running in front of you, trying to wrestle the gun from you) I can't see any other reason for accidental deaths / injuries involving guns than user error. Please, do give me other examples if I'm wrong, but I don't think I am.

Congratulations, you know more about guns than most of the anti-gun crowd, as well as a disappointing number of gun owners. What you go on to describe is basically the first 3 pages of the NRA basic pistol safety manual - always treat a gun like it's loaded, always point it in a safe direction, and always keep it unloaded until you're actually using it. You're absolutely right - "accidental" shootings are virtually always negligent.

NRA basic pistol, rifle, every single hunter's education course in the nation (and many other nations) as well as thousands of safety websites, videos, and general use books. Jeff Cooper put it this way, and this is the way it's taught in safety courses world wide.

RULE I: ALL GUNS ARE ALWAYS LOADEDRULE II: NEVER LET THE MUZZLE COVER ANYTHING YOU ARE NOT WILLING TO DESTROYRule III: KEEP YOUR FINGER OFF THE TRIGGER UNTIL YOUR SIGHTS ARE ON THE TARGET

RULE 1 is not violated when you clean a firearm. If you understand it means operational firearms. Aways disassemble before cleaning. Rule 2 is the same. Until the weapon is in pieces that pose no more danger than bits of metal, do not point the end that goes bang at anything you don't want destroyed.

Besides, shot "cleaning a gun" often means no one wanted to admit to it being suicide.

As I said, it's not absolute - there are things unspoken involved. Firearms are not always disassembled when cleaning. For instance, the US Army Field Manual for the M1 Garand, does not advise disassembly prior to chamber and bore cleaning.

Of course, the same applies when transporting a firearm - they are frequently pointed at things you won't want to shoot. The unwritten part is that if it's unloaded, on safe, and encased, you're OK.

As I said, it's not absolute - there are things unspoken involved. Firearms are not always disassembled when cleaning. For instance, the US Army Field Manual for the M1 Garand, does not advise disassembly prior to chamber and bore cleaning.
Of course, the same applies when transporting a firearm - they are frequently pointed at things you won't want to shoot. The unwritten part is that if it's unloaded, on safe, and encased, you're OK.

With good reason. If you've ever disassembled an M1 you know that its a pain in the butt to put the spring back in. If my life depended on using that weapon, I'd not want to take the spring out very often at all. You could spend 20 minutes just trying to get the spring in if you're not very well practiced.

I was taught gun safety from my father at around age 10 and I remember these as the rules.

1. Consider a gun loaded at all times.2. Never point it at anything you're not willing to shoot.3. When lining up the target, don't just think about the target, think about what's behind the target. Paper targets don't stop bb's or bullets.4. Put your finger on the trigger when you know the consequences of pulling the trigger.

They will often say that someone accidentally discharged a weapon while cleaning it in order to keep the family thinking that their loved one is damned to hell for all eternity, or that they were responsible for the mental anguish that caused his suicidal thoughts.

Fixed that for you. Always assume a gun is loaded - even if you have absolute, undeniable proof that it isn't. It's the kind of crap they teach before kindergarten in rural areas.

Well, I personally wouldn't call firearm safety education "crap," but you're right that it is taught to children at a very young age in rural America (where I happen to hail from).

I remember being taught the 4 Cardinal Laws of firearm safety as young as six:
- treat every gun as if it's loaded
- never point a gun at something you don't intend to destroy
- always identify your target and what's behind it before firing
- keep your finger off the trigger until your target is fully sighted

Unbeknownst to me at the time, these are actually the same rules developed and taught by shooting legend Jeff Cooper. Since reading his Wikipedia page, [wikipedia.org] I've come to believe intimate knowledge of the methods and ideas developed by Cooper should be mandatory prior to allowing a firearm to be purchased.

So would locking guns in a gun cabinet when not in use, as you're obligated to do.

But that relies on owner action.

These technologies are designed to remove owner action from the safety equation. It doesn't matter if the owner is responsible or not, since the technology doesn't care.

Any system that relies on personal-responsibility is unsafe, since individuals aren't reliable.

Any well designed system doesn't allow for individual actions to break the system.

Like how cars won't start if they detect alcohol on the driver's breath, right?

Or how plastic bags automatically shred themselves if they detect a child's head within them.

There's this concept, called "personal responsibility," that used to be the norm amongst humans; in general, the idea is that the onus of survival is on the individual, and if said individual is dumb enough to not follow proven safety guidelines, they take their lives into their own hands.

You're everything that is wrong with designers of any stripe. Holy arrogance, Batman!

Seriously, were you intentionally being obtuse? I'm claiming that, in aggregate, yes users will end up knowing your system better than you do, at least if it's used often enough. They will find bugs, they will find exploits, you are not omniscient nor perfect. Your system will have flaws and new and interesting idiots will cause it to fail in new and spectacular ways. The best you can do is minimize the potential for catast

Accidental deaths occur in the US because people are morons. We have teenagers who find their dad's gun and wave it around trying to look cool, with their finger on the trigger. Never point a gun at something you don't intend to shoot; keep your finger off the trigger until you intend to fire (resting it next to the trigger, not contacting, allows you to fire nearly as fast but prevents a twitch or bump from tugging your finger on the trigger). Waving your gun around at people with your finger on the trigger puts a lot of momentum in a heavy chunk of metal, which eventually leads to that heavy chunk slipping slightly, possibly toward your finger as your hand changes direction (see: waving the gun around), causing the trigger to pull, putting a bullet in your mate's head.

There's the "Hey watch this" crowd who don't know how shit works. Load a magazine, pull the slide to cock the gun, so totally cool I got my dad's gun huh? Drop the clip out so it's now unloaded, put the gun in your mouth, pull the trigger, die. See, when you cock the gun, a bolt or a door moves out of the way and a spring in the magazine pushes the stack of bullets upwards. This leaves a vacated cavity in which a bullet moves into, which is then closed. Now you drop the clip, the bullet remains in the chamber, and you shoot yourself.

Find a gun, assume it's not loaded, point it at your friend and pull the trigger. Because you didn't load it, so it must not be loaded. Guns aren't supposed to be kept unloaded because they can accidentally fire (that's impossible with i.e. a Glock, which has the hammer half-cocked so it can't detonate a bullet's primer, plus a bar in the way of the hammer, plus a retracted firing pin, plus a door between the hammer and the cartridge, all of which shifts out of the way and into place when you pull the trigger); they're supposed to be kept unloaded because morons find your gun and assume it's not loaded.

People load a gun, cock it, and then stick it in their pocket or in their belt or something instead of an appropriate holster. Juggling it around that way eventually sets it off.

People fail to realize that almost every firearm they're likely to find in the US is both automatic and repeating. They pull the trigger. It fires. They don't remember cocking it. Somebody gets shot.

Americans are bigger pussies than Brits, and will get a gun just before some event--say the husband is going away for a two day trip, or they just moved to a black neighborhood and they're white. Yes this is how Americans think--black people mean crime, I get that lecture from my dumb parents every time I move to a black neighborhood. Someone comes home late at night, people freak out, grab the gun, go investigating, and shoot their kid who came home at 1 in the morning because he didn't turn the lights on and had a baseball cap so they couldn't see his face. Seriously, just 'cause someone's in your house and you can't identify them, that's terrifying to an American, so we shoot them. And you thought the British would stop their tough-guy talk and wet themselves the second they sense danger, huh? Americans fire off every round in the gun while screaming and crying, then continue to scream and cry and talk about how scared they are.

Guns don't kill people. Murderers and idiots kill people. A gun does not pick itself up, make a dorky face, shout "hey watch this!", and then point itself at the nearest person's head and pull its own trigger. Everyone wants an SUV because they know they'll hit about 50 cars, bicycles, and telephone poles a year and they want some kind of tank to protect them. Naturally, we kill each other here quite regularly by driving vehicles at 80mph past elementary schools while kids are trying to cross the streets. That's when we're not trying to impress our friends by drinking Purell Hand Sanitizer, eating broken glass, swallowing marbles, trying to ingest more drugs in one sitting than the next guy (I TOLD U I WUZ HARDCORE), burning our arms with car cigarette lighters,setting our pants on fire trying to ignite our farts, and whatever the hell else we can come up with.

No, a semi-automatic weapon is an automatic weapon. There is also fully-automatic. Depending on who you ask (different regulatory boards, manufacturers, the military, in different countries), the definition floats around a bit--in America the standard term for "automatic" specifically requires that gas from firing the rifle eject the bullet, and largely that it also reload the chamber and fire again. Of course in America we legally term these "Machine Guns" as well, as a separate term--"machine gun" means "Fully Automatic". Weird.

Some countries in Europe term semi-autos as "automatic". A bolt-action shotgun is not automatic, but repeating. A double-action revolver is both repeating and (semi)-automatic. An Uzi is fully-automatic. Depending on who you ask, in what agency, and in what country, someone will tell you a revolver is automatic. Depending on who you ask, someone will tell you a fully-auto pistol would be vastly inferior to a semi-auto.

And those aren't uninformed stereotypes, those are real events. This is how teenagers get shot with guns. They shoot each other or their parents are morons. Brother Brittypants was unclear as to how anyone manages to "accidentally" get shot--the answer is by being morons. People who handle guns properly do not accidentally shoot themselves unless someone's dog bites them in the ass while they're reloading; that only leaves the stupid, of which America is full.

Plenty of the stupid buy guns "for defense" and don't bother to learn to use them. It happens. I don't know why. My parents got guns without going through any kind of training course to use them--dad was military, mom has never handled a gun in her life but now owns two Rugers registered in her name with zero training. She wanted them so she can defend herself against home intruders. I have watched both these morons point them around the house with their fingers right on the triggers, not realizing bullets will go through interior walls and egress windows, claiming they're not loaded so it's okay to wave them around like that. Developing terrible habits.

The last time I picked up a gun, I got yelled at because it was loaded and it was a real pistol... I was trying to elevate it from its position on the end of a table, about 3 feet away from direct reach of an 11 year old who thought guns were awesome and liked to point empty (real, by the way--his parents gave him real, unloaded firearms as toys) guns at people and pull the trigger and make pew-pew sounds while they went click click click.

These are the people that you find around "accidental shootings." This is how they happen.

Whether the gun is loaded or not doesn't matter at all. Just pointing a gun - loaded or not - at someone is considered "assault with a deadly weapon". It's a felony that can put the gun wielder in jail for a year or two (or more, depending on the circumstances), if convicted.

Supporting anecdote: An old friend of mine caught his wife cheating with someone at his house, freaked out, went to get his gun, and pulled a gun on him - ordering him to get out of their house. He left (quickly), and the police showed up in short order. The net result: the friend did 2 years in jail - and the cheating wife and lover walked away.

Moral(s) of the story:

* NEVER, EVER just brandish or wave a gun at someone. If you pull a gun out, you absolutely, positively must pull the trigger.

* When you do use it, you'd better kill your assailant/target to avoid civil lawsuits (Sidenote: Here in Arizona, a proposition just passed last month that takes away the right to sue if the plaintiff was in the act of committing a felony when they were harmed.)

"NEVER, EVER just brandish or wave a gun at someone. If you pull a gun out, you absolutely, positively must pull the trigger."

This is oversimplified to the point of being harmful. You shouldn't pull a gun out unless you intend to use it- but if the threat ends, e.g., criminal turns tail and flees, do NOT shoot the target in the back.

The author mostly had me with the first half of the article, then went overboard praising the Product Safety Commission and even worse, safety-related lawsuits. I'm glad guns are exempt -- many if not most product safety lawsuits are shining examples of why we need tort reform.

Really? What happened to those bedrock conservative principles of accountability and responsibility?

What happened to them? Simple - You completely misunderstood them.

I bear complete responsibility for my actions. If I choose to smoke, if I choose to drive recklessly, if I chose to play Russian Roulette with a semiautomatic - Then I bear the responsibility for the outcome. Not Marlboro, not Ford, not Ruger. Not the corner paki, not the car dealership, not Walmart. Me.

Pity, really that such a concept so eludes the "progressives" that someone would actually, legitimately mistake not finger-pointing at the manufacture as giving up the idea of "responsibility".

I'm glad guns are exempt -- many if not most product safety lawsuits are shining examples of why we need tort reform.

Really? What happened to those bedrock conservative principles of accountability and responsibility?

They exist, and exempting gun manufacturers from being responsible for what people do with their products is a perfect example of the philosophy.

Similarly, if a drunk driver hits you in traffic, you don't get to hold the manufacturer of the drunk's car accountable; you sue the drunk, as it was his responsibility to operate the vehicle in a safe and legal manner, not GM or Fords.

is one of those obvious legalities that you would think you shouldnt have to have.

It's like the family that sued Cessna after their father, with insufficient training, crashed and died. (I guess its not his fault he didnt know how to fly)Or the people who sue the bar for the drunk who rams their car. (i guess its not his fault he was too drunk to drive)Or the guy who cut off his finger on a table saw, and sued Sears for not including the tech that automagically stops the saw. (I guess its not his fault he put hs finger on a frigging saw blade)

The MFR simply makes the product.The owner still carries full weight and responsibility for proper use and misuse.Shouldnt have to have a law to state that.

I use various kinds of carpentry tools and yes they can be very dangerous if you don't use caution. Pisses me off seeing people being cavalier about safety when working with something dangerous like a saw, or electricity.

Or worse when they blame the tool because they decided to disregard the various safety features and put their thumb in the path of the blade.

We're basically talking about adding technology to made guns NOT WORK, which means you are just adding another potential layer of failure to prevent the weapon from working. You want to know what solves most of those problems?, gun safes, which won't add a single potential failure layer to the overall picture.

Note: magazine safeties prevent you from clearing the firearm, which means you can't guarantee it's not loaded.

Many gun owners seem to be particular about the amount and type of safety mechanisms they will accept on a gun. One good example is the key lock system that you see on Taurus and S&W Revolvers. It's just a small mechanism w/ special key that renders the gun inoperable if locked, and it is completely optional, however it's not difficult to see cases of individuals refusing to buy one for that reason alone, or looking to get a "pre-lock" version of the weapon.

I would not buy one for just that reason. A couple of Kahrs I own do not have safeties. But I have never "accidentally" fired off a round, because I'm rather meticulous about the 5 rules of gun safety:

1. All guns are always loaded.2. Don't let the muzzle of the gun cross anything you're not prepared to shoot.3. Keep your finger out of the trigger guard, up on the frame of the gun, until the sights are on target and you're prepared to shoot.4. Always be sure of your target and what's beyond it.5. Maintain

Except that people are talking about reinstating the "assault weapons ban" law that expired in 2004. That law did ban guns because they looked dangerous, even though they were functionally no more dangerous than many other weapons that were still legal. Perhaps it would help if you knew something about guns and about current gun laws (and about what people are actually proposing).

Since firearms accidents are quite rare (you're more than five times more likely to die in a fire than a gun accident [nsc.org], with just 600 out of 128,200 unintentional injury deaths in 2009 being from firearms), and "smart gun" technologies mostly would interfere with the ability to quickly deploy guns for defensive purposes, the call for these technologies ranges from well-intentioned ignorance to a back-door attempt to drive up the price of guns and make self-defense tools unavailable to poor people.

Target shooting is one of the safest sports a school-age kid can participate in. There are millions of injuries in school sports every year, hundreds of thousands requiring doctors, tens of thousands requiring hospital care, permenent disabling injuries and even deaths. Sports are a major cause of traumatic brain injury in kids. Shoulders and knees are being permanently damaged daily. Among the major sports players, something like 15-30% of kids will be injured at some point.

The editor, timothy, corrected the egregious errors in the submission while letting the parts worthy of commentary and debate stand. He did what an editor is supposed to do! Maybe 12/22 will be the end of the world after all, and this is one of the first signs of the imminent apocalypse!

My sidearm has a de-cocker and can be dropped or even thrown with a round in the chamber safely.

Say we are in a crisis situation, both pinned down behind cover, I don't have a shot, but you do.You have been shot in your dominant arm (or handicapped one armed) so you are unable to fiddle with a weapon.I can safely throw you my weapon with a round in the chamber ready to shoot, you can pick it up and shoot with no delay.Try that with some electronic gizmo......

There are 2 simple reasons why this isn't being done.1. Cost for the indentification unit is prohibitive. It would double the cost of the weapon.2. It has been proven over the years that you can not make something idiot proof. I don't care if it's a weapon or a power tool, some moron will always come along and try something nobody else ever imagined and injure themselves or someone else. Look at all the safety warnings in any instruction manual and realize that someone actually did that.

Teaching people to have a respect for human life would do more to stop these mass killings than anything else. When I was in High School (class of 74) half the vehicles in the student parking lot were pickup trucks with a gun rack in the back window. There was always a rifle and/or a shotgun in the rack. We never had anyone shot at school because we knew the difference between right and wrong.

I worked for a place that had tried to develop electronics which were supposed to improve gun safety in such manners (for the record, whilst I wouldn't want them on any gun I own, I fully support anyone who wants the option on weapons they purchase). Turns out that actually shooting the gun is *very* hard on the electronics physically and led to many early failures (meaning the gun does not go bang when you need it to).

Possibly it might be possibly to harden the electronics against such shocks but that's even more expense and complexity. Let's have some real R&D instead of pie-in-the-sky BSing.

How about a handgun like the sword in the movie blade, that if you grip it and don't disable the booby-trap mechanism blades will swing out, disabling the person attempting to sue the weapon.

In all seriousness, though, making guns safe is not all that difficult. I have a TT pistol made in Yugoslavia sometime in the early 1960's; in order to be sold in the US, a safety switch blocking the trigger had to be added. The safety switch was not necessary, though. First of all, the gun is single-action; you have to cock the hammer in order to fire the gun. The hammer has a half-cock, which does two things: it blocks the trigger (basically your safe-mode--you can't fire the gun), and it keeps the hammer off of the firing pin, so that if you dropped the gun it would not fire accidentally. On top of that, it has a magazine safety--if you remove the magazine from the gun, the trigger is blocked. This is particularly useful because many people assume that a gun without a magazine is unloaded, but there may still be a round in the chamber. In the case of this pistol, no magazine = no firing. If the hammer is pulled back and there is a round in the chamber, you can drop the magazine and prevent the gun from firing; then you can pull back the slide and eject the round. The hammer can also be manually decocked, which is very dangerous if the gun is loaded, but doable if for some reason you had to disarm it without ejecting all the ammo.

My point here is that this gun, which is at least 50 years old, is actually very safe to handle and operate. I don't really think we need fancy technology and shooter-identification systems. Hell, the M1911 features a safety-grip so that you cannot pull the trigger unless you're firmly gripping the gun. To make guns safe, you just have to not do anything that is extremely stupid and you're fine. Don't keep a gun loaded when you don't have to. Adding safety features and technology won't prevent violent crimes--the shooter in the recent mass shooting was using a rifle that he purchased himself and was firing it intentionally, so no safety feature would have made a difference. People make a big deal about how the shooter used an AR-15, an "assault weapon," but in reality it was just a generic semi-automatic rifle. Any hunting or sport rifle could do the same, so in order to prevent shootings you'd basically have to ban all firearms of all kinds, and even with the ban shooters would still get and use them. I doubt a suicidal or insane shooter would care too much about breaking a firearm ban if he already had intentions of committing mass murder. Even with a bolt action rifle, he could have done the same or greater damage (bolt action = increased accuracy, better aiming).

While a lower rate (football alone) isn't American Football responsible for approximately 25 deaths or catastrophic injuries per year?

(4+ direct deaths such as severed spines, 9+ indirect deaths like heart attacks, and an average of 13 injuries such as total paralysis)

I'm not saying this as a plea to ban football in HS. (However, I think we do put our HS players in too much danger), but to illustrate that I believe people are wildly overreacting to the actual threat. Mass shootings average 100 deaths per year. That is an astonishingly small number when you factor in the population size, and when you also consider the risk due to things that are completely avoidable like HS football.

That's only for waterfowl hunting. Shotguns with higher capacities are perfectly legal and easy to obtain. In fact, many come with higher-capacity tubes and an insert that prevents it being fully loaded. It is then perfectly legal to remove the insert, but illegal to go duck/goose hunting with it removed.

Have you ever been target shooting? Having to reload a handgun after every three rounds would be a significant inconvenience, for no actual benefit. That's not to say that some sort of limit on high-capacity magazines may not have some effect, but 3 is probably going a bit far.

Also, shotguns are only limited to three rounds when used for hunting or trap/skeet competitions. You can easily find models that hold 7 rounds [remington.com], e.g.

Shotguns are limited to three rounds in the field, but not in your house. You can insert a wooden plug to temporarily restrict them to three rounds if they aren't constructed to take that few. Some weapons offer an ammo restrictor so that you don't need a plug. For self-defense, though, I would rather have a whole lot of rounds. If I'm confronted by an armed attacker, I'm going to treat rounds like potato chips, and they're can't have just one. And frankly, what unarmed attacker will charge me when armed wi

It's fairly well understood that the sound of racking (that's the proper term, I believe) a shotgun actually will not scare away an intruder. I wish it did--I'd much rather have the bad guy run away than have to shoot him.Secondly, if you want a larger spread, you don't get a larger barrel--it's 12gauge (or 40, or whatever) all the way down. You can get barrels with different chokes, which constrict the opening at the end of the barrel to various degrees.

actually, no, the sound of a cycling shotgun will not chase most home invaders away. Most of those types of criminals are either high enough or stupid enough not to recognize the sound for what it is - especially since they're not expecting to hear the sound at all... (and not all shotguns sound like the stock Foley SFX from the movies). But, if you start off with a very loud "I have a shotgun aimed at your head, asshole" followed by racking a round, *then* they'll know what's happening. But you've probably

When the amendment was written, what percentage of firearms were capable of holding more than three shots?

At that time, citizenry had about the same percentage of more-than-three-shot weapons, as the government did. I think both sides had somewhere around zero.

I believe the situation has changed since then, though. Perhaps I am mistaken. If you can assure me the 2012 government doesn't have any weapons with more than three shots, and doesn't have the capacity to quickly obtain more-than-three-shot weapo

Here's why I don't like magazine disconnects. They interfere with the safe consistent operation of the gun in other situations. For example, the Ruger Mark III pistol has a magazine disconnect. You have to "dry fire" the gun in several steps while cleaning. That means, rather than remove all magazines and ammunition from your work environment while cleaning, you need to keep a magazine (unloaded yes) to insert and remove at various points in the assembly and disassembly. It makes the whole process significantly more complex.

It also means that you can't easily practice with that gun without ammunition. Although the gun is safe to dry fire, when you cock the hammer, the slide will lock back. Without the magazine disconnect, you would simply pull the slide back and let go an you'd be ready to dry fire. Dry fire activities are valuable, but they're also a place where people make mistakes. So it'd be better all around if you could remove all ammunition and magazines from your environment when doing it. Adding complexity to the process makes it more likely you'll commit an error.

I prefer the simpler more consistent operation of guns without a magazine disconnect. But my very first lesson to new shooters is also that a gun with an empty magazine can still be loaded (and I use a dummy round for that lesson).

They interfere with the safe consistent operation of the gun in other situations. For example, the Ruger Mark III pistol has a magazine disconnect. You have to "dry fire" the gun in several steps while cleaning. That means, rather than remove all magazines and ammunition from your work environment while cleaning, you need to keep a magazine (unloaded yes) to insert and remove at various points in the assembly and disassembly. It makes the whole process significantly more complex.

Not only that, but the trigger feel is awful on a Mark III with the magazine disconnect. Pulling the trigger actuates the disconnect mechanism which causes the magazine to move slightly. In fact, when I first bought my Mark III, it would fail to fire at least once or twice per magazine due to the slop in the disconnect mechanism. I'd have to drop the magazine and reseat it each time this happened. I removed the magazine disconnect, and I've had exactly one malfunction (a failure to feed, IIRC) among the man

Why and when do you have to dry fire to clean? Why does the gun have to be assembled to do that? If not why are you not depressing the catch with another tool?

The Ruger Mark III requires a magazine inserted and the trigger to be pulled to disassemble the pistol as per their published instructions.

"Insert the empty magazine into the magazine well until it "clicks" and is fully in place.Disengage the internal lock, if necessary. (See p. 13.) Place the safety in the"off" (F) position. Point the pistol in a safe direction and pull the trigger tobe sure the hammer has fallen. The hammer must be uncocked before thepistol can be disassembled. Remove the empty magazine."

You want a better way to protect yourself, where nobody will likely die?

Err, I have no problem with an intruder dying. Anyone that breaks into my house, I assume they are there armed and to cause me bodily harm, and I have no problem emptying a few clips into them. An intruder will, ideally....be carried out in a body bag.

If you've got your guns properly locked in a safe, then they're worthless "in an emergency"...you'll never get to them in time.

Because some idiots can't be responsible, then those of us who can must suffer having our rights reduced?

Yes.

Look, I'm a gun nut myself. I grew up around guns, I know guns, I have guns, I use guns.

Shit, I'm even smart enough to know that "freedom isn't free" - that our freedoms have been paid throughout history in blood.

But shit...massacre after massacre...children, families, lives ruined...84 gun-related deaths a day. How much blood must be shed? How many innocent people have to die before we realize that our willingness to kill each other is the fucking problem?

You said above you have no problem with an intruder dying. Honestly...think about this for a second. You come home, find someone robbing your home, and shoot the fucker. He's a 15 year old unarmed kid stealing shit. Or a 40-year-old unarmed asshole robbing your place. Yeah, he made some shitty choices obviously, but does he deserve to die? Are you really prepared to live with that choice? What about cases like Zimmerman - regardless of the circumstances and the actual facts surrounding it, he killed an unarmed teenager.

I don't hate guns at all. As I said somewhere in this thread, if its him or me (or my family) about to die, I'll pull the trigger. I'll protect my family, and I'll kill or be killed to see them safe from harm. But honestly, if you see this as anything but a last resort, then you're a part of the problem, not the solution.

The irony of this post, along with your signature about DRM, is absolutely staggering.

As you state, we can't come with a technology that effectively prevents unlawful use of a frigging MP3 while not overburdening the lawful licensor thereof, and yet you turn right around and think you can do the EXACT SAME THING with a firearm?